


Circumference

by perceived_nobility



Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: M/M, nonbinary!Hermann, trans!Hermann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 19:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1790398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann's life has a periodicity: dreams that arc up and up followed by rejection, by failure that drags deep, deep down.  He fights wars with his father, with his body, with the nature of the universe.  The dress is simple, fluid, whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circumference

**Author's Note:**

> Scenes that accompany/exist in the same universe as my Hermann-in-a-dress drawings ( http://andropogonfalons.tumblr.com/tagged/hermann-in-a-dress-series )
> 
> Pronouns reflect Hermann's self-perception.

I.

He wants to be a pilot, or an astronaut. Something that lifts him into the skies, gives him a vector tangental to the Earth. Something with a big, baggy uniform that will hide his sticklike bird bones. Something that will take him high enough that he loses sight of his house, of his street, of his block—so high that the only thing he can hear is the easy draw and release of his own breath.

 

II.

Karla gets a dress for Christmas from their parents. She’s giddy over it, twirling down the hallway and letting the skirt lift. Hermann thinks he could graph the curves it makes. Smooth arcs defined by lift and drag and a light, boundless grace that leaves him slightly breathless. Hermann follows her down the hall, carrying the balsa wood model airplane he finished last week. He sticks it up as high as his arm will carry it and swoops it in waves that approximate the path of the hem of Karla’s skirt like it’s the wind.

 

III.

He lets his first boyfriend in college take him to a gay bar. It’s crowded, dark and smoky, and he can’t move without getting someone else’s sweat on him. There’s a drag show on a raised stage beside the bar: tall queens in taller wigs, rouge bruising their cheeks at sharp angles, dresses shining in colored lights. It’s all a bit distasteful, the drag queens most of all. They are all artifice, conjecture, a regression of femininity that makes swooping exponents of subtlety linear. The bodices of their dresses are all the wrong shapes for their shoulders. He sips his drink slowly, letting it sit on his tongue. It’s mediocre beer, cheap because that’s what Frederick can afford after the cover charge, but he’s had enough of it at this stage to risk saying things he wouldn’t otherwise say. When the queens come offstage, he catches one of them by the elbow and asks her where she finds her heels. “Amazon, honey,” she shouts back at him, giving him a curious once-over, “You’ll need some good concealer with them, too. That chin of yours could slice a nice boy’s tongue off.” She chucks it affectionately before sauntering off, the sequins on her gown glittering. Hermann doesn’t end up buying heels. His leg is getting stiff and shaky enough by turns that he doesn’t want to risk it giving out on him when he’s changed the pressure map of his weight on the ground. He finds flats in matte black and navy blue with pointy toes and straps that wrap around the ankle, and he buys them, wears them on weekends when Frederick isn’t around.

 

IV.

Vanessa stares at him, skirt settling around her legs like mist. He blinks, shifts his cane to his other hand, shuffles his feet. “It’s quite becoming,” he says, because it is. She’s breathtaking in the apartment, barefoot, toes painted light blue like a lake in summer. The dress looks soft, light—linen and cotton, white and knee-length with textured embroidery at the hem that gives the skirt fullness and weight. Vanessa reaches up, undoes the button at the nape of her neck. The dress folds off her in iterations. She hands it to him without a word, pads out of the room. He’s choked in layers: shirt fully buttoned, sweater vest, slacks, socks and shoes and an undershirt, and when he removes them he does so carefully, folding each and stacking them on her bed. The dress is simple, fluid, whole. Clothing distilled—if he were the type to follow Plato, he’d call it a Form. It drifts onto his shoulders, floats over his narrow hips, slightly too large there. The skirt settles gracefully, he thinks, enough to distract from the darts, pointed and empty, on the chest.

 

V.

It’s 2013 and the world is ending, the world is changing, the world is being ripped open in an exchange of mass and energy that should be physically impossible. Hermann is twenty-four and terrified. He watches people panic and run and die; he watches platitudes fall flat; and, after a long, long time, he watches some common core of goodness start to shine. He works, hard, long, and late. He comes home with chalk dust on his hands, on the sleeves of his sweaters, smeared on his forehead; and after a time, he doesn’t come home at all. When he comes back to pack for Anchorage, he finds the dresses in his closet where he’d left them, soft and smooth as ever. He folds them into garment bags, making sure they don’t crease, and packs them into his suitcase.

 

VI.

Hermann tries out pronouns: she is too soft, too rounded; the hir of zie too close to her; he likes ne, nem, nir but they’re too open, too vague; n is any number but there is only one Hermann. Hermann chooses xe because x is a place in space, x is a solvable mystery, an answer before you know it in other words.

 

VII.

Hermann would wear the dresses more but the Shatterdome is huge and cold and drafty, and full to the brim with gossip. Nobody new is transferred in anymore, and those who are left sink deeper into each other’s business as the size of the world outside shrinks. Xe buries xyrself in sweaters and a huge coat xe found at the PPDC surplus: it’s warm and waterproof and cheap, and when xe pulls the hood up xe feels a little like xe’s in a jumpsuit, ready to blast off into space. It feels childish to be comforted by such things, but on days when the death toll is measured in powers of ten, xe will grasp hard at any comfort xe can find. The day the announcement comes in that every Dome but Hong Kong is closing—the day xe learns that the leaders of the world have given up, the day xe watches xyr carefully curated pedestals crumble—xe lays all xyr dresses flat on xyr bed. Xe touches all of them, smoothing out the wrinkles and plucking the straps straight. Xe hesitates, not sure for a moment which to wear: the baggy cable-knit sweater dress is like the blankets xe would wrap xyrself in on cold winter mornings at home; the vintage sundress still smells a little of grass and light, if xe closes xyr eyes. In the end, xe picks up the evening gown, dark sapphire like the night sky reflected, constellations of tiny rhinestones around the bodice. The straps are thin and the back cut low, and it will be cold, but xe doesn’t care. The only pity will be getting chalk dust on the front. Eyes follow xem through the hallways to the lab. Voices hush as xe floats past, back ramrod straight and cane clicking a fast tattoo. Xe launches xyrself at the chalkboards in the lab, writing fast and cramped and furious. Hermann hopes xe looks like an angel on the ladder: shoulder blades sharp as folded wings, equations haloing out in awful light around xem, dress dark like the night, dark like the sky that has inspired dreams and housed gods. Xe is brilliance draped in negative space, a hollow in the universe that screams no. Ancient, far-traveled light that resists.

 

VIII.

Vanessa is crying big, happy tears. Her face is redder, probably, than the webcam is making it seem. Beside her, her partner Jane squeezes her shoulder and grins wide enough to split the universe in two. Hermann has a hand over xyr mouth: xe wonders if this is what it feels like when the magnetic poles reverse—like everything Hermann is is spinning on inertia alone, careening wildly as xe tries to reorient xyrself to orbit something different. Hermann waits until the call is over, because this is something for Vanessa’s eyes alone. Xe slips into the linen-and-cotton dress Vanessa had given xem years ago and wraps xyr arms around xryself. It’s as close as xe can come to embracing her. Xe takes a picture with xyr phone and texts it to Vanessa: “Much love to all three of you”.

 

IX.

It’s 2025 and Hermann is packing the last of xyr personal effects into PPDC-stamped cardboard boxes. The droopy sleeves of the sweater-dress catch on loose corners of tape, shedding fuzz. Hermann scowls and tapes over them, folding the new tape crisp and flat against the cardboard. It’s still cold in the Dome but xe has new tights: tights that have never been ripped in a frantic dash to LOCCENT and never will be. Tights that are thick and strong, tights that will be worn to the theatre and to fancy, candle-lit restaurants—places where tights like this belong. They won’t be cut up by battles against sharp metal desks, won’t be tied in nervous knots by fingers twitching with formulas unsolved, with lives unsaved. Hermann tapes the last box closed and drops it on the pile with the rest. They’re stamped for postage, ready to be collected by the courier xe’s requested. Xe shrugs into the PPDC surplus coat, letting it settle slowly onto xyr shoulders. Xe hefts xyr suitcase in one hand, xyr cane in the other, and steps out into the hallway. Around xem, the Dome empties: workers rush to and fro in little eddies of movement, transferring packets of life outside like gravel down a river. Hermann joins the current, wrapped in warmth.


End file.
